Study Guide: Midterm 2 Review

Fall 2015

Midterm 2 will cover Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10, and the material on
etymology and dictionaries talked about in class. Covered material includes class lectures, comments and discussion, as well as
web pages linked to the course schedule during the dates since we
started this material after Midterm 1.

The focus will be on these topics:

Polysemy, semantic change, etymology

Dictionaries

Latin and Greek word structure and sound processes causing allomorphy

Genetic relationships of languages; the Indo-European language
family (and a tiny bit on the few languages of Europe that
are NOT Indo-European)

Proto-Indo-European (the language) and its changes, such as
Grimm's law

Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and what it tells us about the
Indo-Europeans and their culture, economy, mode of life

language and society - language and its groups of speakers, and
their relationships (geographical, social, etc.) and characteristics
(economic, educational, etc.)

kinds of language variation - by geography, social group, style

Varieties of English. Regional and social dialects.

Slang. Characteristics of slang

Neologisms and their spread in modern culture

Questions on the midterm will assume some knowledge of concepts introduced
in the previous chapters, but these will not be tested specifically.
By now you should know all these concepts on the
Definitions page
introduced earlier in the course, and how to use them, even if
you could not write a definition of them yourself without help.

Skills tested:

ability to recognize examples of various types of semantic change
(including the types of change that the book groups together
under "results of semantic change" - traditionally these are all
considered kinds of semantic changes)

knowledge of some specific word histories discussed in class and
on web links

understanding of the nature of dictionaries and basic knowledge
about the history of dictionaries in Europe (including a few major
figures in dictionary-making)

ability to get quick, authoritative etymologies via etymonline.com;

ability to read complex dictionary entries such as those in the
OED, and extract information about etymology, polysemy, and semantic
change

knowledge of some of the ways that the structure
of Latin and Greek (the classical languages) have impinged on English,
for example how some
of our loanwords contain Latin or Greek grammatical forms like gender
markings or
particular verb inflections; how Latin/Greek inflectional categories gave rise to some
irregular plural markings, or words with different plurals, or other
oddities of the English lexicon

There is also a little on parsing and word formation types/neologism
types, since as mentioned before these are topics that continue
throughout the course. See earlier review pages and linked pages to
review these.
See also the
Course
objectives and skills recap which describe some of the knowledge
and abilities you should have with respect to Indo-European, language
variation, and the other topics of the course.

1. Polysemy, Semantic change, etymology (incl. word stories)

The notes below the terms in this section are provided to clarify the differences
betweeen some of the terms.

Metaphor is the use of a word for one concept to mean another, similar
concept. Metaphor involves some perceived similarity between two
things. ('Thing' is used in a very broad sense here.) Metonymy does
not.

For example, the word fork can mean the place where a road or path
splits into two roads. This meaning of fork is metaphorical: it is
based on the shape similarity between instruments with prongs, like
the forks you eat with or the barbecue tool for spearing meat, and the
configuration of roads or paths on the ground: Two or more longish things
emerging from a joined base.

Metaphor is sometimes called "domain shift"
because we use it to think about concepts in one domain (area of
experience) in terms of another domain. We use language of the domain
we better understand to talk about the concepts we don't understand
or don't know how to describe so well. For example, as discussed
below, in English and many languages, we talk about time
in the terminology we use for space, because time is not concrete, and
is not at all easy to understand. Once we spatialize it, it becomes
more understandable, to the point where we don't even have another way
of understanding it.

The fork example, like the hippocampus example discussed
in class (hippo 'horse' + campus 'monster' = 'seahorse' --> 'pair of roughly sea-horse-shaped brain parts important in memory storage'), involve shape similarity between two physical objects. But
some similarities are not visual at all; they are more
abstract (cognitive) similarities. The many metaphors involving
spatial terms being used for temporal concepts show that we view time
and space as similar in their basic configurations. Also, when we
speak of loud colors, or a sharp taste, we are taking
words from the domain of perception of various kinds, and using them
to talk about another channel of perception. Loud is usually about
sounds in English, but a color or pattern that is visually striking and jarring can also be said
to be loud.

Metonymy is a change or process in which there are two things
conceptually close together in time and space- they occur in the same situation - and we use the word for
one to refer to the other. If we said I hear a piano, what we are
actually hearing is music (or at least noise from the piano), but we
use the word for the object producing it to refer to the sound. "The
same situation" is often described as "the same place and
time". I think that "situation" is a clearer formulation.

Another example is the case of visual properties and the objects with those
properties. For example, the case of loud colors above is a case of
metaphor; but when we talk about a loud tie we mean a tie with
a loud pattern or color. The property of the color/pattern
(loud) is applied to an object having that property. The color
and the object occur to our visual perception at the same time and in
the same place. The two things (the color and the shirt) are so
related that we might have trouble even realizing that they are
logically separate concepts.

Synechdoche and eponymy are specific types of metonymy. All involve
situational "contiguity" (nearness in time and space).

Broadening/generalization vs. Metaphor and metonymy

The following distinction was discussed in class. Broadening, like
narrowing, is specifically about types and subtypes: the word for a
specific type of thing or action, a hyponym, comes to be used for
the general type, a hypernym, that INCLUDES the original thing or action. So, the
English word dog, originally a word for a particular breed of dog, now
means 'dog' in general. The new meaning includes the old concept but
is more general ('general' here MEANS inclusive); it is a more general
TYPE of thing or action. Dog in Old English was a hyponym of
the older English word for 'dog in general', hound. Now in
Modern English dog

Metaphors don't really involve inclusion or different levels of types. They are about similarity in two different domains of experience. So even though a metaphorical
meaning might SEEM more general than the original meaning, it is not,
in the sense that semanticists use the word general. Example: long< > meaning 'extended for a considerable period in time' is a metaphorical
usage based on simlarity of spatial and temporal longness (based more
fundamentally on the perception of time as being line-like). The word
long did acquire a temporal sense, so it might seem that it is more
general than if it just meant 'extended a considerable distance in
space'. But that is not what we mean by general in terms of semantic
change, or else all cases of increasing polysemy would be
generalization. But they are not. Temporal longness is not a more
general (inclusive) type of longness than spatial longness. It is just
a DIFFERENT type of longness.

The same arguments apply to metonymy. A metonymic extension might, it
is true, yield greater polysemy, like when the word money first came
to mean 'coins; currency' in addition to its original meaning. But
that does not mean it refers to a more general TYPE of thing. Coins
are not a more general type of thing that also includes temples or the
warning goddess. They are a kind of thing that happened to be in the same
situations where those earlier kinds of things were mentioned.

So watch out for the difference between generalization vs. types of
change that involve increasing polysemy; or a layperson's other potential
interpretations of generality. Generalization/broadening in semantics
always means 'process of coming to refer to a more general TYPE of
thing/action, which includes the more specific types it used to
refer to exclusively.

genetic relationship
related languages VS. languages affected by culture contact (and
therefore borrowing)
language family
family tree metaphor
parent language, mother language, ancestor language
sister language
daughter language
dialects
language breakup
(due to loss of contact + different changes in different places)
Grimm's law; language family it affected
sound change
reasons for persistence of evidence of relationship:
--regularity of sound change
--resistance to change of basic vocabulary
Indo-European
Reconstruction of aspects of Indo-European culture (linguistic
archaeology): economic system, family system, technology
Proto-Indo-European (the prehistoric language):
Reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European words
The Indo-Europeans: origin, time of migration to Europe,
Hypotheses on geographical origin
Germanic (West, North, East)
Celtic (Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic)
Italic / Romance. Same linguistic family. But "Italic" refers to Latin and its sister and ancestor
languages; "Romance" is name given to the modern descendents of
Latin, French, Italian (and its various dialects), Spanish,
Portuguese, Catalan, Provencal, Romanian, Corsican, and Sardinian
Hellenic (the family that includes Classical Greek, Demotic Greek
(language of the New Testament), and modern Greek dialects
Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian)
Slavic (East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian; West Slavic: Polish, Czech, Slovakian;
South Slavic: Bulgarian, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian
Armenian
Albanian
Indo-Iranian - Indic (sometimes called "Aryan") subfamily:
Sanskrit and its modern descendent dialects (Punjabi,
Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu). Iranian subfamily: Persian languages,
including Farsi, national language of Iran.
Tocharian
Hittite language (Anatolian family). Hittite and its speakers, the
Hittites, were referred to in the old Testament, when they were
powerful. Now all that's left of them is some texts found in clay
jars.
Non-Indo-European languages of Europe: Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian
(Finno-Ugric languages); Basque (isolate language, no known linguistic relatives)

5. Language Variation and Language in Society

prescriptivism
descriptivism

dialect = a social variety or geographical variety; contrast popular
meaning of term, infused with judgement of
'good'/'bad'. Linguists don't apply judgements like this; we
look at varieties/dialects objectively so we can study them more
accurately. Language attitudes are due to historical and cultural
factors; they do not reflect instrinsic "goodness" or "badness" of
linguistic forms or varieties. Language attitudes towards variants
typically change over time as the relationships of the groups
change through history. The prestige or high-power group can
become the despised group if they get invaded and lose power. And then their
language is seen as "bad" or "low class". Cf. the Anglo-Saxons
under the Normans; or Tex-Mex speakers in Texas.